A Quest 1 at this point is about 100 dollars used. A Quest 2 is about 250, and a Quest 3 is about 500. Pick your level of bang for buck, then most of the things that could be described as metaverses are free to play/use.

A real metaverse would essentially just be "the internet" but for VR. We don't have that. But the most popular metaverse-like stuff we have is akin to second-life type stuff. User created spaces all connected together by a hub and spoke system. VRchat is the most populous, rec room is also pretty big, Altspace might still be good, I haven't checked in a while. Probably lots of other options. Meta of course wants their "Horizons" to be the metaverse, but in actuality it's the crappiest free option.

Speaking of Second life, they did make a VR port of it, but last I tried it sucked and was hard to get working. Don't know if they have done any more work on it or if they gave up.

I think it's mostly just still too early. We are only just now getting headsets that are worth it for normal people and not just us Autistic people. So VR is only just starting it's trek towards mainstream. I know 20 million headsets have been sold, but retention is not high yet. It should be starting with the Quest 3 and other headsets of this generation, since normal people actually like it now.